A labour of freedom: 'free wombs' and slave emancipation in postcolonial Uruguay

The workings of the transitions from slavery to freedom shaped development paths in the Americas. I rely on a new dataset based on manuscript population listings to offer the first quantitative analysis of selective slave emancipation in postcolonial Uruguay, where by 1836 a third of people of African descent were free. Freedom came primarily through their own labour—both in the sense of working and giving birth—in an institutional context which was at best indifferent to their destiny, as fewer than 3% of them directly benefited from the 'free wombs' reform. Ref lecting racial status hierarchies, people born in Africa and those of darker complexion were more likely to remain enslaved. Using a probit model to control for the effects of age, origin, gender, and other covariates, I show that Black people were more likely to be free in smallholder rural areas, especially less fertile ones. The results suggest that the lack of any policy towards freedpeople resulted in an embedding of racial inequality onto de facto resource allocation before the de jure abolition of slavery in 1852.